Junk Science hits fan -
Modeling used to promote concept of 'global
warming' in error
from
Washington Times
by Patrick J. Michaels
Posted 8/29/02
2/26/02
Back in
December 2000, President Clinton and Vice
President Gore were busy fellows — what with
dishes to pack, furniture to ship and an
election to contest. So busy were they that
they neglected to read some of the fine print
in a cascade of administration-ending
paperwork. One of these was an obscure item
called the "Federal Data Quality
Act" (FDQA), which was dutifully signed
by the president.
Put simply, the FDQA prohibits the use of
junky science in the promulgation of federal
regulations and laws. And, now that the new
hats are in town, it shouldn't be much of a
surprise that the FDQA is being turned against
the "science" of the Clinton-Gore
team, particularly concerning the global
environment.
Specifically, it has been turned against the
"U.S. National Assessment of the
Potential Consequences of Climate Variability
and Change" (USNA), a document that
breaks the cardinal rule of science: If a
hypothesis doesn't work, throw it out. The
Assessment can't pass the simplest of
scientific tests.
The Assessment began with a 1997 letter from
Mr. Gore to all the federal agencies, and was
published 10 days before the 2000 election. If
the Office of Management and Budget chooses to
apply FDQA, the Assessment will be redacted
down the Memory Hole soon.
And none too soon. The power of the USNA's bad
science can be seen in recent drafts of the
energy bill of Senate Majority Leader Tom
Daschle, South Dakota Democrat, in which the
USNA provides the findings necessary to induce
new fuel economy measures and prohibit
drilling for domestic oil — all in the name
of global warming and its pernicious effects
on America.
In fact, that it serves as the basis for
legislation is the reason that the USNA has
run afoul of the law. The FDQA requires
scientific objectivity and normal
reproducibility of positive results in any
simulation or scientific experiment that
underpins prospective regulations. The
Assessment has neither.
The
Assessment purports to project the
consequences of United States warming,
produced by two computer models. One is
from Canada and the other from the United
Kingdom. Both models are extreme outliers.
Unlike the consensus of the dozens of
available models, the Canadian model produces
an exponentially increasing heating. The
result is a ridiculous rise of 8.1 degrees
Fahrenheit in projected U.S. temperatures this
century. The U.K. model predicts greater
precipitation changes than any other model the
USNA looked at.
A horde of peer reviewers — some from
federal laboratories that have a track record
of global warming doomsaying — told the USNA
that the use of these two models was wrong.
Even the greens at the United Nations agree
that these models can't be used to make local
and regional climate projections with any
reliability.
How does even the rankest climate amateur know
the Canadian model is a joke when applied to
the United States? Because it
"predicts" that U.S. temperatures
should have changed 300 percent more than they
did in the last 100 years. In fact, neither
the Canadian model nor the British can beat a
table of random numbers when it comes to
predicting U.S. temperature for the last
century.
A
climate model is nothing but a statement of
scientific hypothesis: What we
"think" should happen based upon
currently fashionable theory. When a
hypothesis doesn't work (i.e., performs worse
than a bunch of darts thrown at the Dow
Jones), the ethic of science requires that it
be thrown out. In this case, it means that the
USNA should have used better models, or,
absent a defensible model, it should have used
none. If a computer simulation of climate
can't beat a table of random numbers over the
United States, it borders on scientific
malpractice to continue to apply it.
It wasn't that the politically chosen leaders
of the USNA didn't know there was a problem.
In fact, the USNA's politically handpicked
steering committee was so disturbed about the
finding of the peer-reviewers that it
commissioned its own study. Guess what? The
USNA's own scientists verified that the
temperature models didn't work over the United
States. And yet the report went forward, now
serving as the basis for the most sweeping
energy legislation ever introduced in this
nation's history.
Well, anyway, all of these shenanigans are
precisely what the Federal Data Quality Act
was designed to prevent. The irony is that the
obscure piece of legislation that slipped
through when Mr. Clinton and Mr. Gore weren't
minding the store is about to throw the USNA
and its global warming hysteria into its
well-deserved dustbin.
Patrick J. Michaels is senior fellow in
environmental studies at the Cato Institute
and author of "The Satanic Gases."